At a Nature Center During the Pandemic

by Jay Paul

[This piece does not directly address mental health. All of the posts on here do not. I want to present my thinking on a variety of issues because I wonder if there is something characteristically schizoaffective about how I use my mind. Maybe there isn't. But if you see something, please let me know, because the following question is animating much of this blog: what does schizoaffective contribute to the diversity of human thought? I know schizoaffective is often devastating. But it is also a specific window on experience. This piece originally appeared in a Vail Place newsletter.]

written on April 29, 2020

The irony is not lost on me: I am about to burn fossil fuel to drive in my car to a place where I can commune with nature. My assumption is readily apparent to me. “Nature” is not what I see and hear out of my apartment window—the cars, the parking lot, the hum of the highway blocks away, the birds, the trees. Somehow, “nature” is considered that which exists independent of human intention or will, as if humans are not natural. But this assumption, and my car, cause me to visit a suburban nature center on the fuel I bought this morning, that probably came from North Dakota or Louisiana, that ultimately came from decayed leaves deep underground, the remnants of a mass extinction of plant life eons ago. The car runs by a highly refined and processed fire—the internal combustion engine—which gets me to the nature center.

           Signs in the driveway there remind me to social distance, to keep my six feet from other humans, because of the dangers of the global COVID pandemic. I am happy that there are not too many cars in the parking lot. Perhaps such distance will not be difficult to keep. I walk the asphalt path to the woodchip trail in the woods. I hug the edges of the trail to keep away from some other people there. On either side of the wood chip trail are mowed grass and weeds. I remember about nine months ago, before the pandemic and before winter, I walked these trails to the annoying cadence of a whirring motor. It grew louder as I walked the trail up a hill and around a bend. A small tractor had an arm that reached out beyond the trail and was mowing the growth at the edges. The tractor operator lifted the mower at an elbow so I could walk by. I saw the vicious, rotating blades. I thought of the little critters, the mice and moles, it must kill or at least scare, all so that I and my fellow humans have a safe trail to walk. They may cut back the weeds to lessen the possibility of getting ticks, and thereby Lyme disease. These woods are a convenience to us humans.

            Indeed, all wilderness has become a convenience to human beings. What is a wildlife refuge, after all, but a demarcated place on a map, where humans are ordered to stay away for the most part, except, perhaps, for backpackers and scientists? But the very fact that wilderness is now demarcated as a place to be protected means there is no wilderness in the strict sense. The whole earth has become a zoo, existing for our human convenience, with trails through wilderness where we can go to enjoy the flora and fauna: I recently read that there are now more tigers in captivity, in zoos, than in the “wild.”

            But there is a price to making the earth our zoo. Knowledge is small and flimsy, a midnight streak of lightning that shows only enough to reveal how much we will always be incapable of seeing. We may demarcate wilderness, but we still don’t know what lurks in our zoos. The coronavirus is said to have come from wild animals brought to market in the city. The virus is not new to the wilderness where it originated; it is new to the human body. With globalization, with the fires of carbon-based fuels and electricity, it flies about the whole earth as quickly as its human carriers go. And we go fast. But we can’t outrun nature.

            Any civilization is a mere form nature can take. And I am reminded as I walk this trail in these manicured woods, hearing the chunk of a woodpecker on a hollow tree, that humans are way off the trail, and ill-equipped to move through a forest where we cannot read the trees and rocks as markers of where we are located, as our ancestors did who actually lived here. Instead, we today mark our place by houses and yards and other buildings. We need a maintained trail to get through the woods, unless we’ve had special training, a kind of training that treats the forest not as home but as a place to be demarcated, conceptualized, and known. Today, we “know” our way through the forest. Formerly, it was simply home.

            And there is so little we know. And so much that can get us. There have been pandemics before. There was the black plague in Europe. Probably the greatest was the one that decimated the native populations of the Americas in the 16^th through 19^th century, some of it intentionally caused, biological warfare. Each civilization who experienced one probably thought it was the end of the world, or at least close to it. This one doesn’t feel like the end of the world to me. Many will die, but eventually we will come to herd immunity, either through infection or through vaccination. But something is more deeply unsettling. This pandemic seems to have come because we have simultaneously known too much and too little. And this seems to be the state of the current human culture, one that has become worldwide. We are way off the trail, bushwhacking through a wilderness we have categorized and conceptualized but cannot ever fully known, exposing ourselves in our heedlessness to what lurks there. And we are learning that we are way off the trail even in malls and office buildings and meat packing plants. We stay six feet from each other and wear masks. We have made a zoo of the planet, and it has come back to get us.

            It does so blindly, of course. When I climb a hill in this nature center, I grow winded: I am reminded that with each breath microbes and bacteria are inhaled and killed by my immune system. But I do this without conscious intent. The microbes and bacteria die because they are sucked into my biological system that eliminates them. Of course, we humans don’t get sucked into wildernesses where novel viruses lurk. We go there for food or for scientific discovery or for recreation, to places we dominate with our knowledge yet don’t know at all. And the ecological systems there produce viruses hostile to us, that thrive on us and eliminate some of us.

            I hope to see wildlife as I walk this wood chip trail. I’ve seen deer here many times before. They usually eye me warily, then go about their business. Humans, they know, usually stick to the trails and leave them alone. But I see nothing living today other than a few squirrels and small birds. Instead, I see a dead duck in the middle of the trail. It had bled out from the neck but was not yet decayed. I imagine a raptor, perhaps a hawk or eagle, had attacked and killed it, then dropped it before eating. A park ranger will probably clean it up. A few steps later, a middle-aged couple walks toward me and lines up against the far edge of the trail as I hug the edge of my side. We smile and say ‘hi’, moving quickly, six feet apart.

            The virus started halfway around the earth. The couple I met on the trail probably drove a car—burning fossil fuel—to get to the nature center. They, like me, probably wanted a break from the drudgery of the quarantine and turned to manicured nature to provide it. They are afraid of my being infected and showing no symptoms. I, too, am afraid of them. 

            Last year we had record rainfall in Minnesota, probably in part because of global warming. The ponds in the nature center are swollen: I walk a long bridge above a portion of the trail that formerly went between two ponds and now remains underwater. I am close to the asphalt trail that takes me back to the parking lot. I will get in my car in time to get back to my apartment for a zoom meeting, all of which is dependent on processed fire, in the form of internal combustion engines and electricity. Most of humanity will make it through this pandemic. So will civilization. But I can’t help but see it as a harbinger of greater challenges, ones that question exactly how our small concepts of nature leave us, ultimately, vulnerable and not at home.